All About Health

In May 2012, President Barack Obama declared war on Alzheimer’s disease.

So we’re fighting two wars.

It’s easy to make comparisons between assaults on two of the most feared diseases in this country.

Cancer is now talked about in polite company –a victory in itself — and Alzheimer’s has muscled its way into the conversation. But the disease still is full of mystery and confusion about its causes and the best way to treat and cope with it.

Come to think of it, 40 years later that describes a lot of what we know about cancer.

The U.S. death rates from all cancers combined for men, women, and children continued to decline between 2004 and 2008, according to the National Cancer Institute. The overall rate of new cancer diagnoses, called the incidence, among men decreased by an average of 0.6 percent per year between 2004 and 2008. Overall cancer incidence rates among women declined 0.5 percent per year from 1998 through 2006 with rates leveling off from 2006 through 2008.

Yet I’d venture that every person in the country has at most two degrees of separation from a person with cancer. Statistics may say we’re gaining, but take a look around the battlefield.

The war on cancer has been a multi-billion dollar slog with no exit strategy in sight. The war on Alzheimer’s, which has gotten dimes to cancer’s dollars, has been given an end date of 2025, when scientists will have developed effective treatments. (Treatment is a long way from curing or the holy grail of prevention.)

By some estimates, it takes 15 years to get a drug from the lab to the patient. We’ve got only 13 in which to figure out how to treat this devastating brain disease.

Those drugs are tested in clinical trials, which adhere to rigorous ethical standards that include patient consent. It can be tough enough to get healthy people to sign up for trials, particularly ones that may extend for several years. People without symptoms will need to volunteer, and maybe they’ll come in droves. Getting consent may not be an issue. But how do you ask for and know you’ve received consent for someone at any stage of dementia? How can researcher test drugs that could arrest or reverse cognitive decline?

In 2007, the last year for which data is available, 74,632 Americans died of Alzheimer’s disease; 1,999 New Yorkers succumbed. From 2000 to 2007, the death rate increased from 17.6 to 24.7 per 100,000.

People who’ve been fighting Alzheimer’s for decades may already have battle fatigue. But initiatives such as alzheimers.gov bring in the reinforcements and give patients and their families the strength to keep going.

But 13 years is not a long time when we’re talking about diseases that still aren’t perfectly understood. We need to make sure that over the next decade and more, the progress we make is real and we don’t give the illusion that we’ve accomplished the goal when we’ve really just started the mission.

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About this blog

Patti Singer

Health Reporter

Being healthy means that you’ll be in good shape if you get sick. That may sound odd, but think about it. We may not be able to prevent every illness, but if we can delay it, minimize it and recover quickly, we can get back to our lives. That’s the beauty of a healthy lifestyle – what I call wellness insurance.

I’m fascinated by how we define health and what we do to achieve and keep that physical, emotional and spiritual sense.

I used to be a sports writer. I joined the Democrat and Chronicle in 1985 to write about the Rochester Red Wings and wouldn’t trade that experience for an infinite number of first-round draft choices. I moved from sports to features in 1991, and wrote about personal health, travel and general topics. I joined the metro staff in July 2009 to focus on health.

I am certified as a personal trainer and I earned a master’s degree in education from The College at Brockport, where I teach an undergrad course in contemporary health issues and a grad course in health communication.